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Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Cleaning up the Mayflower Families

It is amazing to me that immigrants that came to America almost 400 years ago and that are so famous and have so many descendants in the United States, are still the subject of a considerable controversy. I have been spending some of my time at the Family History Library cleaning my records about the Mayflower families. With books and research that have been published since my last record cleaning effort, I have found all sorts of changes in my database. I have also added several sources, such as FindAGrave.com entries for all of the original families.

Few of the Mayflower passengers have a proven ancestry. If you happen to have an ancestor numbered among the original passengers, you just might want to check the latest evidence and conclusions about their ancestors. I found that the presently accepted lines differ from those I incorporated a few years back. My particular passengers were Richard Warren and Francis Cooke and his son John Cooke. The families in my database had also seemed to pick up a few extra children along the way.

These changes illustrate an important principle; genealogy and family history should be well founded in sources and reasonable conclusions. But just as important is the fact that all historical conclusions are open to further interpretation depending on the discovery of additional facts through reliable sources. In the last two days here at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah this principle has been demonstrated again and again as people in our Family History Expos group have done their research. In one case, a researcher with an ancestor, who had a recorded birth place, found that given the date recorded, neither the town nor the county were in existence at the time of the birth. This opened up a question as to the reliability of other information in the researcher's records.

In my case, a research article in The American Genealogist, dated April of 2003, and entitled "The Marriage of Richard Warren of the Mayflower," caused some major revisions to that family's entries in my own records. This was especially true when the General Society of Mayflower Descendants had incorporated the newer findings in their series of books. If you do research in this area, you will soon see that every assertion made by the researchers is supported by a source and those facts that are not are openly acknowledged as tentative or unproven.

Not all of us have legions of researchers looking at the facts about our ancestors, but the same fundamental principles still apply. We move from the known to the unknown and try not to jump out into fantasyland. Most large businesses go through an annual audit, perhaps those of us with large databases should go through a periodic audit of our records to see if anything has changed and if what we already have makes some sense and wasn't just copied from an unreliable source.

James, thanks for another interesting blog. I also update my material when it applies to my family. On another note, I have some photos taken of Elizabeth Alden's tombstone, you and your readers may copy these pictures. She was the child of John and Priscilla, and married William Pabodie. http://lifefromtheroots.blogspot.com/2009/11/tombstone-tuesday-elisabeth-alden.html

They are IOUSs on steroids. There are over 82 duplicate entries for Francis Cooke waiting to be combined. You literally cannot do anything on Family Tree with any of these families because, at this point, you cannot make any edits to the one main iteration of the individual because there is no guarantee that your changes will not be lost when the records are combined.

As a Family tree missionary I am now merging the IOUSs of the Francis Cooke LZ2F-MM7 line. And LZ2F-MM7 is the key ID of Francis Cooke. I have found that now as old nFS is NOT controlling Family tree the big thing now causing problems in the amount of notes which can not be greater than 50. Yes I know this is a big task. I also have the Silver book of Vol 12 of the Mayflower of Francis Cooke as the guide.

I realized what you were doing and was happy to see that you were involved. Thanks for the meticulous work, but we all need to realize that the same thing needs to happen with almost everyone of these early New England families.

I have recently researched my three times great-grandfather, Stephen Armstrong who married my three times great-grandmother, Lucinda Hovey and Lucinda's grandmother, Asenath Cushman, was directly descended from four Mayflower families - Isaac Allerton, Stephen Hopkins, George Soule and Francis Cooke. Asenath's parents were Alethea Soule and Allerton Cushman. There was intermarriage between these families (slim pickins' for mates in 1600s Massachusetts I assume)! So, I am just more or less beginning my Mayflower journey as this is something I have found out in just the past two months.

I am not sure if this is the case for all Mayflower Families, but it seems that familysearch is doing some interesting things with the family I have been working on (William White and Susanna, etc.). I have been trying to clean up the family members as much as I can, but today, I discovered that a lot of what I have been doing was basically undone and a lot of new records seemed to be added to the database. Can anyone explain what happened?

I'm very new to genealogy and as it stands am also related to Richard Warren. I'm finding it extremely confusing because I find so many sources for three different wives (all of which have "Anna" as a daughter.) So, I'm wondering in cases like these, what's the key to making sense of these so I can be sure I've got the right person?

For one thing, we will have to wait until FamilySearch Family Tree is entirely separated from new.FamilySearch.org. That will take some more time. Second, the missionaries at FamilySearch are trying to straighten all this out. So, right now, we wait.